I've been here before, James said, but his voice was silent, merely a thought in the void. He looked down and saw that he had no shape or form whatsoever. It was as if he was a ghost, invisible and unimportant, a mere observer in a world that was not his own. A shock of panic overwhelmed him and he turned on the spot, seeking some help or even a friendly face.
The first face he saw, however, was his own. His cheeks were pallid in the darkness, lit only by a guttering gas lamp near the mouth of the alley. His eyes were wide with shock. His wand was lowering in his hand.
"We're sorry for what happened to Fredericka," a voice-- Ralph's-- said solemnly. "This man may have been a part of our world… but we aren't like him."
James suddenly saw it all. This was the night that he, Ralph and Zane had gone in search of the dimensional key, a magical silver horseshoe held by the powerful and sadistic Alma Aleron professor Ignatius Magnussen. Having followed the professor into mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia, they had witnessed the rather shocking truth of his demise-- that rather than escaping into the World Between the Worlds with the aid of his dimensional key, Magnussen had been cut down by a single Muggle bullet, fired by a young woman, the sister of one of Magnussen's victims.
But why was James here now, watching it happen again? Was he meant to stop it somehow? Or was he meant to see something that he had missed the first time?
James watched as Helen met a young Muggle man (William?) near Magnussen's corpse. The man limped slightly; he had nearly been killed by Magnussen and his vicious magical cane before Helen had appeared at the mouth of the alley, the pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart. The man knelt, pried the cane out of the dead man's slab-like hand, and then, with a determined grimace, snapped the cane over his knee.
James knew what happened next-- he had already lived it once. William (the one-time fiancé of the murdered Fredericka) took the velvet bag containing the dimensional key from Magnussen's other hand. He gave it to James, Ralph and Zane, who quickly made their exit, splashing through puddles as they dashed back to Alma Aleron and the fabled Timelock.
But dreaming James did not follow them. Surprisingly, he remained with Helen and William as they began to walk in the other direction, much more slowly, leaving Magnussen's body hidden under a pile of rubbish. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the surroundings began to fade away again, receding into darkness like actors slipping behind a curtain, until all that remained was Helen and William, walking slowly away, huddled together and strangely silent.
And somehow James knew there was something secretly important about them. They were the main story now, not he, Ralph and Zane. He watched the young man and woman as they dwindled into distance.
In Helen's apron pocket, still warm and smelling of spent gunpowder, was the small six-shot revolver. In William's hand, clutched loosely, was the broken head of Magnussen's cane, its eyes dark and diminished, but not dead. Never dead.
A cold wind buffeted over James, taking away the vision of William and Helen, the revolver and the cane. James sensed their story happening beyond the reach of that wind, as if the wind was time itself, stripping away days and weeks, months and years. Helen and William, strangely but not quite surprisingly, fell in love. They were married, and eventually they moved out of the grimy warren of Philadelphia's wharf district and started a new life in the Pennsylvania countryside. There was a ramshackle (but lovingly maintained) farmhouse, surrounded by carefully planted fields, ribbons of straight, narrow roads, and a fresh, bubbling spring.
And there were children. They were happy in the farmhouse, or at least as happy as siblings can be, with their constant rivalries, dramas and petty quarrels. There were three daughters and one son, the youngest of the lot. The son's name was Phillip, and James saw him grow through the years, becoming a fine young man, thin and tall, with a sharp, witty, inquisitive mind.
When Philip was twenty-five, his mother, Helen, died. The illness had fallen over her quickly, in the form of a fierce cold that had blossomed into pneumonia. Philip's sisters lamented how suddenly fate moved, taking their mother in mere days, but Philip was secretly grateful. He was old enough to have seen how lingering illnesses can sometimes diminish their victims, leeching them slowly of joy, dignity, and purpose. Even in his grief, he was glad for his vibrant, joyful mother; glad that she had left the world swiftly, like a young bride eloping with fate, rather than being dragged along by it, slowly and reluctantly.
James hovered outside the old farmhouse as the funeral took place. He sensed the grief and sadness within, the celebration of a life well lived. The faint sound of hymn singing leaked into the evening air, led by the bereaved husband, William, his tenor voice not precisely musical, but strong and clear.
And then, sometime later, as the sun descended into the trees that fringed the fields, turning the sky a cauldron of copper and pink, Philip emerged from the house. He moved quietly, quickly, almost (James recognized this from his own adventures) furtively, dashing along a path between the fields, looking back once or twice to assure he was not followed.
James approached him, followed him silently, as the young man turned east, toward a thin strand of trees, and a rocky gully that bordered it.
Something was buried there. James sensed it pulsing in the earth, felt the pull of its dark magic and undiminished will. Philip was a Muggle, and yet he seemed aware of the buried force as well. Of course he did, for he had been there on the day his mother had buried it, many years earlier. He had been just a boy then, and when his mother had finished her task and returned to the farmhouse, he had dashed into the gully himself, curious to see what she had hidden away there under the rocks. Because Philip understood something that no one else did: his mother-- the woman who darned the holes in his socks and sprinkled brown sugar on his oatmeal, who hummed happily to herself from beyond the closed upstairs door of her bedroom every morning and who tucked him in each night with a kiss on his forehead and both cheeks-- his plain, pretty, everyday mother… was magic.
James understood. Helen had been no witch, but neither had she been purely Muggle. Like Petra's sister, Izzy, Helen had occupied a strange middle ground between the polarities of power, instinctively following some deep, magical instinct, but not aware of it enough to embrace it. That's how she had known to come to the alley on that fateful night in 1859, the pistol stashed in her apron, arriving at the very moment to save her future husband's life. Her secret magic had compelled her. She herself didn't understand it, but neither did she question it.
It was her subtle charms that had made the fields flourish, that conjured the spring to irrigate the farm in the midst of drought, that allowed her poultices and broths to keep her family almost preternaturally healthy and strong over the decades.
And it was her unspoken magic that warned her to bury the tin box with its secret dark treasures out in the gully, beneath the stones and spiders and rough yellow weeds. Inside the house, even hidden away in the attic, the gravity of those treasures was just too strong. Helen had sensed it in her bed each night, heard the insistent, silent call. She worried that eventually her children would hear it, and respond to it.
So she buried her dark treasures. Unfortunately, the very magic that compelled her is what drew her young son to follow her, to watch, and to become curious.
And now, almost twenty years later, on the night of Helen's funeral, Philip returned to the gully. He didn't know why he moved so secretly, so nervously. He only knew that the pull of his curiosity-- and some other, less definable force-- was too strong to deny.
James instinctively tried to call out to the young man, to warn him back. But of course he had no voice here. He was merely an observer, no more able to alter these events than he could hold back the course of the earth around the sun.
Philip pried up the stone and produced a pen knife from his coat pocket. With it, he began to dig, tossing aside crumbles of wormy earth, until the knife scratched metal. A minute later, he wrenched a rusty tin box from the
ground and set it, almost reverently, on the rocks. He shivered as he stared at, fearing the box, but apparently unable to deny its attraction.
He had seen its contents once before, although that time he had left them buried. His mother knew what was best, after all, and if she had buried them, it had been for good reason. Now, however, Philip was a grown man, and his mother (tears pricked the corners of his eyes as he thought this) was soon to be buried herself. Perhaps the magic was broken now.
This was not true, of course. But the rationalization worked. With mud-caked fingernails, Philip pried the lid from the tin box. It came away with a screech, revealing its contents. Both James and Philip peered inside.
Cradled in the rusty box were two objects. James recognized them immediately. One was the pistol that had killed the wizard, Ignatius Magnussen. The other was the head of his wickedly magical cane, its gargoyle's face leering and unblinking, tarnished black but glinting in the dying sunset.
Philip took both of them, and with that single, swift motion, darkness fell over James again, engulfing him utterly.
Time blew past again. Decades unravelled as Philip aged. He took a wife, had a son of his own, and became an old man. James saw him again in a brief, fleeting moment, laying on his deathbed, his grown son standing by his side. The tin was open between them, revealing the pistol and the iron gargoyle's head. Philip had kept them, treasured them despite their aura of dark mystery, or perhaps even because of it.
"These belonged to my mother," he said, his voice weak and rasping. "And now they are yours."
But James could see that the son was repelled by the strange, enigmatic objects in the ancient tin. He took them, but he did not reverence them. Soon enough, the tin was packed away in the attic of a tidy brick house in Philadelphia, all but forgotten, gathering dust through the cycle of decades.
Until a woman's hand bumped against the tin, knocking it aside with a clatter. James watched as the darkness receded again, revealing the depths of the attic, much more cluttered and altered by time, lit by the flat brilliance of falling snow outside a single gabled window. The woman was thin, pretty, with a hint of the long departed Helen in her features. And yet she was sad, somehow. Partly it was the task she was engaged in: emptying the house after the death of her oldest grandfather. But that wasn't all of it. This woman (her name is Winnifred, James' dreaming mind supplied with strange certainty, but everyone calls her Whinnie) was living a life of misfortune and heartbreak. Her five year old son, who even now played on the living room carpet two floors below, was weak with some complicated illness, requiring doctors and medicines she could not afford. Whinnie's husband was no help, having left almost a year earlier, ostensibly in search of employment back east, where he had grown up. Whinnie had not heard anything from him since, and doubted she ever would again. He wasn't injured, or missing. He was just gone.
Whinnie pried the tin box open impatiently, and then paused. Puzzled, she held first the pistol, and then the gargoyle's head up to the wintry light. A thoughtful look passed over her face, but it was much different than that which had appeared on the face of her great grandfather, Philip, almost a century earlier. The year was nineteen seventy-eight, and Whinnie's life had not prepared her for a sensitivity to magic. It had, however, made her acutely sensitive to the possibility of quick money. She desperately needed it, after all. It was just possible, she mused somewhat hopelessly, that the iron gargoyle sculpture and antique pistol might be worth something. Whinnie pocketed the objects, vowing (albeit guiltily) not to tell her brother about them. He wasn't desperate like her. And perhaps if he had been more willing to help her (everyone knew he could have, if he'd wanted to) she wouldn't have had to resort to such petty means.
It was weak justification, and Whinnie knew it. Deep down, she hated herself for it. But self recrimination wasn't enough to change her mind. She clumped down the attic steps, calling for her son to put on his coat and shoes.
Another rush of wind carried James with it, but this one was different. It covered mere space, not time, and James knew that what he now observed was only a short while later, across the city, outside a cramped storefront on a windy street corner. Icy snowflakes scoured the store's windows, blurring the odd collection on display: musical instruments and small Muggle appliances, stacks of cheap books with their page edges dyed yellow or red, antique lamps and cheap glass sculptures. Over the recessed front door were hung three tarnished metal balls, swinging beneath a sign painted with faded red letters:
PAWN SHOP - BUY - SELL -TRADE
Whinnie's car, a large, strangely evil-looking machine with rust-edged fenders and the word Toronado emblazoned on the corner of its boot, sat idling a block away. Whinnie's son, James knew, was not inside, nor was he with his mother, inside the pawn shop. The boy had been left in the care of his uncle, Whinnie's brother. None of them had been particularly happy with the arrangement, but (as Whinnie promised) it would only be for a short while.
As James looked at the plume of exhaust puffing into the frigid air from the idling car, then at the storefront a block away, he had a terrible suspicion that Whinnie was quite wrong about that.
A bell jingled faintly as the pawn shop door opened. Whinnie emerged, and the staccato clack of her heels told James all he needed to know. She had only sold one of the mysterious objects, and she had not gotten anything near as much money as she had hoped. Fuming and worried, she stalked toward her waiting car and James, almost against his will, moved to follow her.
A couple was walking ahead of them on the footpath. James saw that they were man and woman, both wearing black, but they were not man and wife. Sister and brother? He thought yes.
Whinnie stalked forward, the cold wind turning her cheeks bright red, and as she approached the couple, angling to pass them, the couple stopped in their tracks.
A thrill of fear ran down James' spine, for he saw immediately that the couple were magical. American witches and wizards dressed far more like their Muggle counterparts, but the clarity of his dreaming mind was undeniable. The man and woman glanced up at Whinnie, simultaneously and intently. Of course they did, for they sensed the hidden power of what she was carrying, even if they didn't know what it was.
"Excuse me," the woman said suddenly, unsmiling. "Might we have a word?"
Whinnie paused only for a moment. "It's cold and I'm in no mood," she muttered, brushing past.
"I'm afraid we must insist," the man said, and his arm snaked out, grasping Whinnie's elbow in a vice-like grip.
Whinnie snapped backwards like a dog on a leash, her feet slipping on the icy footpath so that she nearly fell-- would have fallen, in fact, if not for the man's stony fist. Immediately, James glanced about the street in search of help, but the footpath- indeed the entire avenue- was empty, filled only with parked cars, moaning wind and skirls of snow.
"What are you--!" Whinnie exclaimed angrily, righting herself and attempting to pry her arm loose of the man's grasp. "Let go of me, you lunatic!"
Instead, the man pushed her forward, into the recessed entryway of a closed bookstore. His sister followed, her eyes flashing with bright interest.
"You're a Muggle!" she said, smiling tightly. "Aren't you? You're not even a witch!"
"A wi--" Whinnie stammered, fear beginning to replace her anger. "What are you, crazy? Get out of my face! I'll call the police!"
"The police!" the man scoffed. "Feel free. None are within five blocks of here. And even if they were right next to us, they would hear nothing unless we wished them to. Now give over your talisman."
Whinnie blinked at him in consternation. His words made no sense. Instead, she renewed her struggle against the man's grip.
Across the street, a bedraggled man peered out of an alley. James saw him, saw his bleary, redrimmed eyes and scraggly beard. He was a bum, huddled pathetically against the cold, but curious at the raised voices.
"For your own sake," the sister declared impatiently, "quit fighting and answer our question. Yo
u have no right to whatever it is you're holding. Did you think we would not sense it? It's useless to you anyway. What could you, a Muggle, hope to do with it? Hand it over and we'll be on our way."
"I have no clue what you're blabbing about!" Whinnie cried furiously, finally wrenching her arm loose and stumbling backwards between the bookstore's dark display windows and toward its closed security gate. It rattled as she fell against it. "You're both completely crazy! Get out of my way so I can get home to my son!"
"Your son will grow up without a mother unless you give us what you have, Muggle," the man replied with vicious confidence. His hand dipped into his coat and withdrew a long, black wand. His sister raised her own, fingering it with relish. Whinnie stared at them, at their extended wands, and shook her head in confusion.
"Look, you've obviously mistaken me for someone else. I don't know what you want. I've got almost nothing on me. Here." She fumbled in her purse, producing a small, thin wallet. "Here's the twenty bucks I got for that stupid little sculpture. That's all I have but you can take it. Take it and let me go." She tossed the wallet toward them, but the brother and sister simply let it fall to the cracked tile floor of the alcove.
"You think it will protect you, don't you?" the sister said suspiciously. "Is that it? Surely you cannot be so stupid. You don't even know how to use it. We do. We can smell its power, whatever it is. We don't care how you found it, or where it came from. Just give it to us. Give it to us and you can go. Refuse us…" she shrugged with one shoulder and gestured with her wand. "Refuse us and you will die, and we will have it anyway."
"I don't know what you mean!" Whinnie screamed, pressing back into the security gate, making it rattle again. She did not know what the wands were, but somehow (James gave her credit for this) she sensed they were dangerous.
"It is very powerful," the brother breathed, stepping forward, his nostrils flaring.
His sister nodded. "But what is it? We must have it."